Routes to employment
With increasing competition in the labour market and perceived barriers due to circumstance and history, many offenders and ex-offenders are turning to self-employment as a viable option to overcome barriers and secure sustainable, long-term employment.
Projects
The Advantage 42 Entrepreneurial Skills Programme is an innovative programme which has worked with 107 offenders, and over 30 have now successfully set up their own business or become self-employed. The Entrepreneurial Skills Programme is delivered through a mixture of workshops and comprehensive aftercare which aims to inspire innovative, creative and entrepreneurial business ideas among participants. The programme is specifically designed to help participants understand what to do when they have a good business idea, how to determine whether or not it will work, and then how to implement their idea as a viable business entity.
Media for Development uses creative arts as an engagement tool; the Media for Development programme uses digital media as a hook for engaging their client group and encourages participants to explore the past and their aspirations for the future via digital photography and video presentations. A range of courses are available, delivered outside the classroom environment. All courses are designed to build participants’ confidence in interview situations and identify transferable skills.
Working in the community
Many offenders have little or no employment history; they often worry about employer perceptions and reasonably believe that employers would be unlikely to employ them when other applicants may have no criminal record. While re-educating employers is a crucial aspect of increasing opportunities for offenders and ex-offenders, a lot of ESF-funded work is focused on maintaining participant motivation and encouraging them to look at opportunities to learn new skills and develop others.
Projects
The Constructing Futures project in Yorkshire and the Humber aims to address the poor or non-existent learning and work aspirations and opportunities available to offenders aged 18 or over serving community-based sentences under local Probation Office supervision. The programme supports local organisations and groups by offering renovation work to their premises, which provides practical experience to participants as they learn and practise basic construction skills such as painting, plastering and tiling. These projects benefit the community, and so the participant’s engagement with the programme counts towards required unpaid work hours.
ESF PIANO (Providing Innovative and New Opportunities) features a strand of work which recruits offenders from prison to work on relatively small painting and decorating contracts upon their release. Although the contracts last only a few weeks or even days, they provide opportunities to gain work experience, earn an income, and provide a crucial first step into employment, developing the independence and confidence to move on to other opportunities.
The Hard Hats project provides offenders in London with the opportunity to acquire specialist practical skills in an intensive, but highly flexible environment. As well as offering qualifications in the construction industry, on completion it also links up with employers to source potential jobs for the participants.
Stoke College Flexible Routeway offers ‘Offender Support’ in the West Midlands as one of six opportunity routeways, where early identification of barriers is essential to provide the most effective information advice and guidance (IAG), and Enhanced IAG in the North East of the UK. The routeway works closely with Probation Services to ensure that a comprehensive package of advice and support is available to all participants.
Links
Institute for Small Business and Entrepreneurship
